Unless otherwise indicated herein, the materials described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
It may be of interest for a computing device to be able to determine its location. For example, a computing device may be a mobile device. The location of a mobile device may change from time to time, and there may be services available to the mobile device that are based, at least in part, on a location of the mobile device.
A mobile device (and more generally a computing device) can include different types of positioning systems for determining a geographic location of the mobile device. For example, a mobile device may include a global positioning system (GPS) configured to determine the position of a mobile device using timing signals sent by GPS satellites above the Earth. As another example, a mobile device may be configured to make use of the presence of one or more particular cellular radio towers, wireless access points, and/or Bluetooth transmitters, to estimate the position of the mobile device based on triangulation and/or fingerprinting. Further, a mobile device may be configured to use data collected by sensors (e.g., accelerometers, gyroscopes, magnetometers, etc.) of the mobile device to facilitate location determination. Still further, a mobile device may be configured to merge data from various sources, such as GPS, Wi-Fi, cellular radio towers, and sensors of the mobile device to determine a location estimate.